Off Topic Coronavirus

The way some people have behaved nationally and internationally (airlines within the USA have recently been flying something like 1m passengers a day for Thanksgivings get togethers) recently it's hardly surprising !
A bit chilly ? That's an understatement if ever I heard one ! It feels more like January or February than November !

 

Actually after putting on a tog 3 sleeved top under my thin fleece coat and doing 2.5 miles in a steady 90 minutes I was soaked! Probably due to the 6kg over weight [ and carrying 7kg rucksack ] ...lol but was gorgeously fine in sunshine and in the shadows quite a heavy frost, about 2mm +on the grass. Saw a record number of squirrels 27, from late kits to plump adults! closest before it saw me was about 4m ! just sold a framed photo of a squirrel for £67 [ frame, was 4 of them was outside a house with a load of tat .. "free to good home!" With leaves gone recorded 11 dreys … 9 different birds 4 flowering plants that should be long gone!
OH well back to prison for another month or so … thanks TW*TS...……..

 

The government has asked the regulator to assess the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, bringing the UK a step closer to a possible rollout.
The referral to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) marked "a significant first step" in getting the vaccine "approved for deployment", the government said.
It follows news that the jab was"highly effective" in advanced trials.
The UK government has pre-ordered 100m doses of the Oxford vaccine.
The government's latest request to the MHRA comes a week after the regulator was asked to assess the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

the weirdness of getting a vaccine approved... we have /most anyway been thinking the answer on the edge of being injected and only today has the .gov asked for MHRA to start approval regime!

 

copied from BBC
Regulator the MHRA assesses vaccine trial data for safety, quality of manufacture, and how effective it is in protecting people

• It then advises the UK government whether a vaccine is ready to be used
• It is part of the Department of Health, and employs more than 1,200 people
• Independent experts on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation decide how best to use a vaccine and who should get it first
• It has drawn up interim advice on priority groups for the Covid vaccine. It also considers how many doses to use
• The JCVI has about 20 members - all are experts on vaccines

 

analysis of the T2 & T3 my house, T3 is about 200m from a boundary with T2. The local pub T3 70m from me is obviously 130m from the T2 …. a further 700m away is the T2 pub! Almost on the boundary of T3 along with the "village" of Whitchurch. the rest of Whitchurch is T3. Customers of the T2 pub are mainly...[ about 95% ] are from T3. Right on the edge of the T2 is a housing estate that had / has very high infection number [ part of my in law family live there and are /have just been or come out infected lockdown … ]
I support the current T3 IMPOSED, but just find it difficult to understand the "line in the sand"

 

This tier nonsense appears to me to be a total bloody mess and it almost seems that you can only stay in a pub if you've bought the right flavoured crisps but if it's an even numbered day then you can get away with a pickled onion. Sounds totally daft to me and if you truly want to eradicate the bug then you need to shut the places down and buy your crisps at the corner store.At least the vaccines look promising as long as you have two packet tops from a bag of pork scratchings.

 

on and off listened to the debates [ either side of my walk ] ref the tier 1 2 3 starting AT MIDNIGHT! tonight.
Starmer is a real hypocrite [ at most times! ] makes a point then veils it in the opposite.. almost same sentence! [ eg we support it, but think the .gov is wrong! sort of thing ]..anyway .gov, technically won the vote by 1 or 2 had everyone voted!
so TEIR 3 we are.
annoyingly from some anti teir rebels and most of the opposition they provoked areas of the country into what they may do or how they should translate the Tier system.. it will be interesting to see in a month pre Christmas whether it keeps going down or those areas of the "rebels/ opposition mp's gets worse or stagnates and those in areas that comply get much better!

A local pub 400m from a lockdown one said her job is going to be harder "I will have to challenge everyone to check their tier, and not looking forward to loads trying to just turn up! "
one tory stated jocularly … you can sleep with your wife for 37 years but cant sit next to her for a meal" [ of course you can of course ] ..

 

that will not be allowed... believe the landlord will get hammered and closed down? customer ? local landlord where we were having a couple pints after our Tuesday night session of our hobby will not be so lax this time [ Lockdown 1 rules ] a meal [ main ] and observe the rules on indoor meeting. 7 of us on 2 tables near to each other at end of evening enabled us to chat … and be within "rules" ...no pork scratchings but main is massive!

 

was looking the charts over the weekend which came up, 80,000 likely to die before the Covid is truly under control … "if ever"
it gave 2 or 4 lots of figures to date.. lowest was COVID LAST 28 days... then totals for ….. covid mentioned / deaths over normal expectation [ historical comparison ]
It is well bandied fact that when peeps retire they degenerate nore quickly and die sooner should they not continue with some form of exercise? Hard to prove but in my sport/hobby a lot of "us "passing is either pre retirement due to clinical disease or after quite a reasonable time enjoying the open air and exercise.. Acquaintences whom I have noted do nothing have quickly disappeared ….. enforced lack of doing things, covid lockdown, would not appear on the death certificate as a cause of death! So I assume the figure attributed to COVID IS ON THE LOW SIDE

 

TRIED PASTING A PIC

 

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GAVE UP ON PREVIOUS 2 posts... comment was with attached pic of Regent Street London it was almost like the picture was taken this time last year! AS DIFFICULT AS SPOT THE BALL tier 3 …. YOU DESERVE IT.... pubs hospitality etc bet you were doing a roaring trade …. not many old people there and look at the densities down the left and right sides … hardly any around the covid wardens though ………... pic is at 1020am on todays BBC news feed....

 

We should say with Covid or with Covid symptoms .......................and not OF Covid

 

new strain …. is apparently linked to the outbreak in [Netherlands] / Denmark where it was found it came back from mink /transferred back to [ 12 ?] humans and would render any vaccine null and void [ most likely scenario ]. A matter of concern is the process can easily be replicated via ferrets!

from article …
Mutations in coronavirus have triggered culls of millions of farmed mink in Denmark.
Part of the country has been put under lockdown after Danish authorities found genetic changes they say might undermine the effectiveness of future Covid-19 vaccines.
More than 200 people have been infected with mink-related coronavirus.
And the UK has imposed an immediate ban on all visitors from Denmark amid concerns about the new strain.
Danish scientists are particularly concerned about one mink-related strain of the virus, found in 12 people, which they say is less sensitive to protective antibodies, raising concerns about vaccine development.
The World Health Organization has said the reports are concerning, but further studies are needed to understand the implications for treatments and vaccines.

"Every time the virus spreads between animals it changes, and if it changes too much from the one that is circulating within humans at the moment, that might mean that any vaccine or treatment that will be produced soon might not work as well as it should do," explains Dr Marisa Peyre, an epidemiologist from the French research institute Cirad, said the development was "worrying", but we don't yet know the full picture. However this is a very unusual chain of events: a virus that originally came from a wild animal, probably a bat, jumped into humans, possibly via an unknown animal host, sparking a pandemic then into mink and back out again !!!!

I note … the UAE has bought and is dishing out to whole countries population the Chinese vaccine! starting now!

 

The bit I’m struggling with is this. You’re very defensive over the current government but you don’t believe what they are saying regarding the virus.
I’m not saying the other lot are any better as in Wales taking a 2 week firebreak when the virus seems to run in three week cycles shows the stupidity of the idea. And it’s out of control over here now, hospitals now at a state of emergency and cancelling non urgent ops. But looking at the English set up 4 weeks lockdown which wasn’t a lock down really as everyone apart from pubs, and some shops were frontline workers, was also stupidly.
The Germans now going into lockdown over Christmas but hey ho we’ve given Covid a week off in the UK.
We should of in March went full lockdown with only true frontline workers working and strangled the spread. I’ve worked throughout this pandemic. Am I a front line worker? Am I bollocks, but construction was classed as essential.

 

I think things are going to get VERY tough over here next year when the Furlough scheme ends. We have to try to pick up the pieces of our economy, with the double-whammy of a no-deal Brexit pushing prices of essentials up - plus the government will need to find a way of taxing us in order to pay for the economic damage that COVID has already done and Brexit is about to do.
I'm SOO lucky with my current position - working from home - for a Financial Services company based entirely in the UK - and if I get made redundant then my retirement simply starts from that point.
I'd be worried if I was starting out with a big mortgage and family now. Some of my younger work colleagues are bricking it.

 

Uh oh you mentioned the word Brexit

 

Some of my younger colleagues only know the company they are with now, and even so, some of them have been there for 15 plus years. I would suggest that due to the culture they've grown up in (which is pretty unhealthy tbh), they would all REALLY struggle to find alternative employment, where they can do so little and get paid as much as they do now.

 

That's what I've been saying all along Rod. I'm defensive over the current government because it's the best of a bad bunch IMO. The opposition were useless and totally unhelpful at the beginning of all of this, didn't have a clue where to start. Once the measures had been put in place, they were only there to criticise (with no plan of their own) trying to notch up party points.
Like you say, IF the virus was considered to be so dangerous then we should have fully locked down.
It's been difficult to judge this virus because all of the scaremongering & misleading figures that have been reported.
I think that the 1000's of people unable to have treatments for other health issues is more dangerous than the virus and will show even more excess deaths in the coming years, but will undoubtedly be registered as a Covid deaths which will enable us to be controlled further!!
Personally, I think most of the measures that have been put in place has made things worse for everyone..

A plan that would have been better, would have been to fully lockdown for 2 months, help reduce the numbers plus give time for preparation to protecting the old, vulnerable & the shielded, used the Nightingale hospitals. maybe setting up more with isolation, dedicated for Covid patients only, leaving main hospitals for other illnesses.
Keep all safe distance measures in place. etc......
Then let the rest of society get on with it.

 

simple let labour win and bankrupt the country and then in future their credit rating will be so bad no one will ever lend them anymore! ...lol ….tic …
since? [a long time ago due to repeats of labour mishandling ] we have had massive debt … they open the sweet shop give it all away … Tory .gov picks up the pieces and [ austerity ] restocks the shop. END OF 2019 the shop restocked and debtors paid off tories blamed for austerity but it worked £tr could be spent over the next 5 years or so with little strain on the purse … along comes covid ……………..

and all done hypocritically, we back the .gov [ until it goes wrong ] then they reneg og on what they said and ignore giving a solution ….

think your thinking is flawed 1 for on this comment!

this is a balancing act... with a problem of not having all facts available! algorythm's etc are part of m0dern day life .should you wish to "produce an algorithm for this scenario" it would need more than an Einstein or 2 or 3 ! you are dealing with a dynamically fluid event …. you can see what you have said [ used the word maybe ] so talking hindsight. The problem was it was moving faster than you could counter it. Remember the floods on the flats!.. HEAVY RAIN FORCAST.. peeps started to sandbag their houses, environment agency added to the bunds and lowered dyke water heights as they were doing this it started raining, heavier the levels got higher they got in the army, water got higher and we had one of the largest lakes on the levels ever!
Problem also with nightingales was staff [ still is to a degree ] there is potentially 1 million people forced out of work, these are people who want to work not the lazy "gimme a hand out brigade" should just 1% decide to take up a different career like NHS/EMERGENCY services [ I was one of 1000 lost their jobs when St annes shutdown I know of about 10 whom I worked with, about 120, who went fire police ambulance nursing … there was 3.4 m out of work 1981 ] then the gaps will be filled.